She’s got young kids and hasn’t seen them for weeks because they were staying with their grandparents out of town when the lockdown started. The family is waiting to move into a new home so there’s nowhere for them to stay in the city and Mum and Dad can’t visit them because it will put the grandparents at risk.

Last week one of the children had their birthday and she and her husband couldn’t be there. It’s conceivable she might not see them again until next month or possibly longer.

Last week she told me she’s stopped looking at Facebook because her feed is full of other parents complaining about enduring lockdown with their kids.

“When I tell other parents that they’re not with us right now, most of them tell me how lucky I am to have some peace and quiet,” she says.

I’m not proud to admit that at various points since the lockdown, I could well have been one of those people. In late March, just as everyone was being ushered into home isolation, I took over primary care of my 14-year-old, Oscar.

Perhaps bravely, perhaps foolishly, we decided that the move should coincide with new limits on screen time (four hours a day across all devices and everything switched off and put away two hours before bed). Because this has partially removed an easy child-management tool, and also because it’s limiting the main channel Oscar has to socialise with his friends when he can’t see them, the limits have thrown petrol on the flames of his teen isolation angst.

Granted, I have it easier than a lot of other housebound families. There’s only one of him and I get to hand him back once a week. But I can still see how easy it is for my greengrocer’s friends to look at her and fail to see the pain of not being with your kids at a time like this, and instead head straight to envy.

It seems to be part of a gaping public divide that seems to have opened up in the COVID-19 domestic experience between those who are doing it with kids, and those who aren’t.

To those experiencing isolation with kids, the average day of a childless couple or single person must seem from afar like an utopia of experimental baking, rooftop negronis and online pet-assisted yoga. Never mind that the apparently carefree procrastibaker in your Instagram feed has probably lost her barista job and spent her last $5 of rent money on a new piping bag.

Exhausting Every Other Way To Pass Time, Couple Begins Ranking Their Lamps was a recent headline on the satirical website The Onion. It was of course meant to highlight the boredom of single life in lockdown but I’m betting that parents everywhere read it and imagined how blissful it would be to have the time and space to rank their home furnishings without having to make another snack, or instantly re-learn trigonometry.

But if you ask me who I’m most worried about, it’s not the parents facing the demands of kids at home (as hard as that is). It’s the people I know who live alone. They may be putting the best spin on things on their socials but they’re also looking down the barrel of an indefinite period of state-enforced aloneness and zero physical contact. No hugs and definitely no intimacy for probably months.

The truth is, everyone’s doing it tough in different ways and the old maxim that comparison is the thief of joy seems more true than ever. Measuring our pressures against those of people in vastly different circumstances is not only entirely pointless, it also robs us of valuable insights into the gifts this situation is delivering and suppresses those green shoots of affirmation that tell us we’re actually doing really well in difficult circumstances.

From this vantage point of someone who is mostly living with a child, but sometimes flying solo, I can only say that as hard as this has been juggling a demanding teen and running a business from my kitchen table, the times that I dread the most are Thursdays, when Oscar is picked up by his mum and I walk back into an empty house for two days until he returns.

In 13 years of co-parenting I’ve never missed him to this extent, or craved his company so much. Usually, I have no problem being by myself. I actually quite like it. But the lack of real contact with others and that eerie feeling of aloneness out in the world has given solitude a new heaviness that is sometimes hard to bear. I can’t imagine what it’s like to live it day in, day out.

But I’m also grateful for that heaviness, because now it’s impossible to take him for granted. After years of either over-managing Oscar and his time, or letting him disappear into his bedroom for hours to play Fortnite, this period is forcing me to connect and engage as a parent. It’s a chance to start doing some things right.

I love the daily long walks and I’m especially enjoying the new golden hours of family time between 7.30 and 9.30. Every night, after the PC gets angrily switched off and the hystronics end, we settle into a Connect 4 marathon, or makeshift game of Celebrity Head with Post-Its, or just more talking.

And even if he’s getting too old for it now and he mostly hates it, I still get to hug him sometimes.

So that’s what I’d like to say to the stretched and stressed parents out there. Of course this is hard and awful in many ways. But when it seems like too much, think about my greengrocer, and all the other parents who are separated from their kids and all the single people who are alone.

If you can hug the people you love the most at the moment, I reckon you’re doing ok.

Read the original article here.